“We need a conception of the human-made world that acknowledges its continuities with this planet’s other systems”, says Tom Chatfield
JooHee Yoon (from New Yorker)
A great friend of the AG is writer Tom Chatfield, one of our most robust and capacious technology critics. His forthcoming book, Wise Animals, is described here:
Wise Animals explores the history of our relationship with technology, and our deep involvement with our creations from the first use of tools and the taming of fire, via the invention of reading and printing, to the development of the computer, the creation of the internet and the emergence of AI.
Human children know no more of modern technology than their ancestors did of older technologies thousands of years ago, and develop in relation to the technologies of their time. We co-evolve with technology as individuals as we have as a species over thousands of years.
Rather than see technology as a threat, this deeply humanist contribution to the debate proposes that we are neither masters nor victims of our technologies. They are part of who we are, and our future – and theirs – is in our hands.
Tom is happy for us to run an extract from the intro to the book below (taken from Tom’s Substack):
In his 1999 essay “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet,” the British author Douglas Adams had this to say about technology:
‘Technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs… and we will cease to be aware of the things.
Adams was both being very funny and making a serious point. The world we’re born into is underpinned by millennia of innovation and ingenuity, most of which long ago sank beneath the surface of human attention.
“Technology” is the shiny, strange, new stuff; the gadgets we can’t wait to get our hands on as teenagers, only to fret over their mind-warping powers once we become parents. So should we all take a deep breath, re-read his essay’s title, then stop worrying and accept that this is just how things are?
Despite being a lifelong fan of Adams’s writing, my answer is “no.” In fact, it’s important for us to head in the opposite direction. It’s not that the world needs more hang-wringing over smartphones, or the kind of nostalgia that forgets how much suffering our ancestors endured (unreliable seating wasn’t the half of it).
Rather, we need the right kind of worries. And this means turning our gaze away from gadgets towards the values and assumptions baked into them—not to mention the structures, incentives and understandings surrounding their creation.
Is it a good thing that my children have, at their fingertips, access to more knowledge than the entirety of humanity possessed half a century ago? Absolutely.
But the fact that a handful of titanic corporations mediate most of their encounters with this knowledge is less desirable; while the fact that conspiracists, cranks, hate-mongers and professional narcissists are given prominent platforms by some of these same corporations is downright depressing.
And that’s before you dip your toes into the murky waters of algorithmic inscrutability, bias and surveillance—let alone the future of AI or the ongoing environmental consequences of industrialisation.
As Adams notes, most of us treat the technologies that already existed when we were born as normal; those invented between then and our thirtieth birthdays as exciting; and everything invented after that as crimes against the natural order of things (at least until a decade has passed, by which time we admit that we might have been exaggerating.)
As a species, we are ceaselessly in the process of reinventing ourselves, and this adaptability is central to our thriving. But it also makes us vulnerable, not least to the assumption that the cultural and technological order we’re born into is both natural and inevitable—while only the “stuff that doesn’t work yet” is worth debating.
If you truly love technology, precisely the opposite is true. To love something is to be obliged to worry about its history, purposes and imperfections; to want it to be better; to say no as well as yes to its offerings.
Caring about technology means paying close attention to many of the things it encourages us to forget: that the world didn’t have to be this way; that it isn’t going to stay this way for long; and that what happens next is, to a discomforting degree, up to us.
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” The media theorist Marshall McLuhan didn’t actually say this (it was written by his friend, Father John Culkin, in a 1967 article discussing McLuhan’s work) but it captures one of McLuhan’s most enduring insights. Technology exists in a constant dance with its creators, each influencing the other, neither able to go it alone.
Faced by the power, complexity and momentum of this inheritance, it’s easy to despair: to submit to the sense that, sooner or later, the systems we’ve created will inexorably save or condemn us.
Yet the determinism underpinning this view is flawed at its foundations: blind to the entwining of our own and our creations’ evolution; deaf to the lessons that history, biology and art alike can teach. We are—for better and for worse—both free and obligated to negotiate the terms of our existence.
How should we set about making our worries useful? First, we need to acknowledge that the deep histories of our own and our technologies’ evolutions are inextricably entwined, and that we can’t hope to understand one in the absence of the other.
Second, we need to resist the denigration of human agency in the face of our creations’ scale and significance: to acknowledge the depths of our interdependence while refusing to accept that there’s anything inevitable about what lies ahead.
In particular, it’s vital for us to overcome certain delusions when it comes to our conceptions of technology: false beliefs that stand between us and a rich, reality-based engagement with the 21st century’s challenges.
Technology is everywhere, today. It touches everything we do and believe ourselves to be. It shapes our deepest anxieties and hopes, our politics and our most intimate relationships.
Yet many of the most influential stories through which we seek to understand it are told from the wrong angle: as if its nature can be debated without reference to our own; as if people and machines are locked in an existential struggle over everything from work and leisure to love and art; as if technology’s progress must necessarily define humanity’s.
None of this is true, and much of it is harmful. Technology isn’t just something we make or do to the world; that we pick up or put down. We cannot separate ourselves from it, because it has been with us since before the beginning, evolving alongside us, shaping our biology and our ecology.
Contrary to many wishful critiques, there is no such thing as human nature or existence in the absence of technology; and this was already true when Homo sapiens first walked the African continent over three hundred thousand years ago. Nor is there any such thing as a neutral tool, untouched by human designs and desires.
Our species is wise and foolish in ways inconceivable to any other creature—and technology is implicated in every one of them.
Thanks to the labour of countless generations, we can collectively describe, explain and remake our world in remarkable ways; can shield ourselves against brute necessity while dreaming new selves.
We can apprehend our universe’s vastest and most microscopic scales while mourning the transience of each individual life.
Yet we can also be prodigiously self-defeating, solipsistic and destructive; deniers and deceivers as much as creators. And confronting the future hopefully means finding a way to acknowledge all of these things: our vertiginous ambition, scope and vulnerability.
At least at the time of writing, machine superintelligences hadn’t entered the picture. But the faith that our fate rests in the hands of a technocratic elite is alive and well, alongside the delusional hopes and discontents it breeds: the abnegation of collective responsibility; the miscasting of certain individuals and corporations as avatars of destiny.
Against this, we need a conception of the human-made world that acknowledges its continuities with this planet’s other systems; that embraces the virtues of compassion, curiosity and humility; and that promises us neither certainty nor mastery, but rather the collective struggle to become less deceived.